[dmk]

The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can write code against your product, your API docs become your actual product. That's a massive shift.

[anthuswilliams]

I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even for products explicitly marketed to programmers.

Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to, tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.

[pjc50]

> Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation

OK, but: that's an economic situation.

> so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.

Right, so there's less profit in it.

To me it seems this will make the market more adversarial, not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended to prevent LLMs interacting with your software or web pages. Or in some cases exploit the user's agentic LLM to make a bad decision on their behalf.

[13pixels]

This extends further than most people realize. If agents are the primary consumers of your product surface, then the entire discoverability layer shifts too. Right now Google indexes your marketing page -- soon the question is whether Claude or GPT can even find and correctly describe what your product does when a user asks.

We're already seeing this with search. Ask an LLM "what tools do X" and the answer depends heavily on structured data, citation patterns, and how well your docs/content map to the LLM's training. Companies with great API docs but zero presence in the training data just won't exist to these agents.

So it's not just "API docs = product" -- it's more like "machine-legible presence = existence." Which is a weird new SEO-like discipline that barely has a name yet.